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More free iPad InDesign goodies!

Mick has done a websearch for you to come up with goodies you can use in InDesign to lighten your workload. Apart from the layers script from Marijan, I found some Digital Publishing free goodies. For those of you who (still) don’t know what the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) is all about, here’s a brief explanation. The Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, which is still in public beta (or get into the Prerelease Program for newer versions) gives you a set of tools to get your InDesign publication on iPad (and other tablets). Best feature? It’s free (for how long <del>nobody</del> only Adobe knows).

So first stop is to download the tools and install them (AIR and extension) on your computer. Next stop: You’ve downloaded the so called “Digital Publishing User Guide” PDF. Well in short: RTFM! If you don’t you will drown in your files and nothing will work the right way. Remember it’s beta software, it doesn’t look nice, it doesn’t work logically. Did I scare you now? Good! You’re the one who wants to publish on the iPad! No seriously, it’s fun creating things and think in different ways of publishing stuff. So, now you’ve passed this little intro, here are some useful goodies for publishing to iPad using our favorite Adobe tool InDesign! Oh in case you didn’t get it, these tools will only work with InDesign CS5.

In order to get things done right you have to create on other formats than the print formats we’ve known for a very long time. Yes, we say goodbye to our A3/Letter/A4/A5 mm, inches, centimetres and cicero’s. Welcome to the pixelbuddies! To get you started in an easy way, here’s a link to 1024 x 768 pixel templates (horizontal and vertical), included are guides for safe area. So your content won’t be messed up by any scroll bars or menus. Thanks to Keith Gilbert’s Blog. To get an idea of how an app (published from InDesign) will look like, I recommend the use of Petteri Paananen’s InDesign CS5 file. This includes portrait and landscape mock ups of the iPad with a background simulating the look of apps published from InDesign. You can take your own screenshots from InDesign (or from the iPad) to show a (possible) client what their app will look like. For more examples of using the DPS you can watch this video from AdobeTV in which Terry White shows you the first steps into the DPS. To get the latest new on DPS follow @adobedigitalpub

So, use these together with the tomaxxiLAYERS to create your own customized (client branded) templates to work faster and in a structural way. That is one of the key elements for creating stuff with the DPS. Structure, structure & structure, don’t forget structure either!

For my dutch friends, there will be a short story/tutorial on the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in the upcoming nIDug Magazine issue 5. I’ll edit this post when it’s published.

One thought on “More free iPad InDesign goodies!”

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